Thank you Ms. Raundi Moore Kondo and Daniel McGinn for helping me get in touch with my dark side.

I am very excited to report that I have taken control of my late night binges and I have lost five pounds this last week. It feels good not only to fit into my jeans again, but to take back control of something that was beginning to control me. It is very empowering.

It seems something clicked deep within me after writing my blog on “nothing” last week. It wasn’t a light bulb moment exactly. It was more of an understanding. Writing does that for me. Or, shall I say the process of writing. As I take all of those jumbled ideas in my brain, transfer them to a blank piece of paper in an organized fashion, things start to make more sense to me and I can finally understand what I am going through at that time. And, because I am an over thinker, it feels almost orgasmic to release all that gobbly gook in my head and put it somewhere for safe keeping. Ahhhh….. It’s a bit like Dumbledore’s Pensieve.

But some gobbly gook runs so deep that a blog is not enough. About 95 % of who we really are is hidden in the subterranean level of our being, the subconscious. These are things that we are not wholly conscious of, or are only partially conscious of, hence the term subconsious.

So when writing my blog isn’t enough, there is poetry. Poetry goes where no man has gone before. It delves into the bottomless caverns of my soul and pulls things out I didn’t even know were lurking in the depths. And, when I am able to turn my inner editor off, wowzers, I am amazed at what emerges on the blank white pages. It is truly eye opening, sometimes even shocking.

It seems I have quite the dark side. We all do, in fact. Carl Jung calls it our “Shadow.” “It is all that lies outside the light of consciousness, both negative and positive.” “Everyone carries a shadow,” says Jung, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

Jung also believed that the shadow is the “seat of creativity.” So to become more fully conscious the key is to bring some of this Shadow out into the light.